Fixing the system

From the underlife of institutions to formal systems If one accepted the systems theory view of authority, given its acceptance of established claims to legitimacy, then it was evident that it had no place for power which did not serve organizational goals. Other forms of power could only reside in unruly spaces where the

Power and the metaphysic of uncertainty

1. Maintaining bounds A whole metaphysic of uncertainty was at work in these rediscoveries of power. What is uncertainty? In some general way it denotes a lack of assurance or convic- tion in what will transpire. Certainty, by contrast, represents a situation where one can predict with absolute surety what a future state of

Power, possession and causality

Systems theory used general attributes to explain phenomena, because the theory was supposed to function as a set of coherent and transcendental terms. Along with the key conception of power being an emergent property that appears at the limits of rationality, where there is uncertainty, some other key terms were imported from political science.

Clayton’s power: the kind of power you have when you’re not really having power

1. Is power a visible and deployable asset? What one can do and say with the causal conception of power, as something given by possession of resources, is very limited.5 First, it appears to be not a social rela- tion but a possession. One has power rather than being in a relationship of power.

Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault

1. Situating Goffman If Weber’s relative neglect is one curious absence in the annals of organization theory, then it is not the only one. The litany of unsung heroes must also include Erving Goffman, especially his work on total institutions,1 not least because he anticipated, in so many ways, themes that were later to

Total institutions

Goffman coined the term ‘total institutions’, to refer to a class of concentrated power. In many ways he anticipated the themes that were later to become popular in Foucault’s (1977) work – the power of incarceration, rules and surveillance – although instead of focusing on design he studied action, which undoubtedly gave greater acuity

Authority at work

Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when authority tells them to, as an experiment by Milgram (1971) demonstrated. Milgram’s research question was simply to ask to what extent ordinary individuals, people who are not authoritar- ian personalities but display all the signs of normalcy, follow the commands of figures perceived to be in authority.

Zygmunt Bauman: another curious absence

It is not only that Weber and Goffman have been written out of the history of orga- nization theory. Others were never written in. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s most eminent intellectuals, notable for many outstanding contributions to social science, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). It is a work of great

Total institutions as instruments of genocide in total war

1. The roots of evil Anti-Semitism was not a novel experience in German life. Weber, for instance, encountered it in his support of the academic careers of friends such as Simmel. Higgins (2004: 89) suggests that the Prussian elite had constructed the German project of modernity exclusively in terms of an ethnic nationalism. It

Marking identity in peaceable total institutions

1. Total institutions for marking life rather than creating death The focus switches now to less harrowing but no less total institutions. First, we shall consider the case of the Irish Magdalene Laundries, in which young girls were held captive in a kind of forced labor serving as a moral penance. Second, we shall

Washing away sin in the Magdalene Laundries

The Magdalene Laundries case presents an instance where the specificity of gen- dered power relations is only too apparent. The gaze that some young women of Eire were subjected to was not one that touched their boyfriends, their brothers, their priests and those others who may have contributed to their ‘fallen’ state. The Magdalene

The Stolen Generation

Australia is today a vibrant multicultural society, one that is highly inclusive of most of those who are its citizens.25 Its original peoples were deemed to exist formally in the 1960s when they were first included in national statistics and electoral rolls, having failed to be written out of history by death or breeding.26

The German Democratic Republic: a total society?

Next, we shall consider what happens when total institutions seek to impose total con- trol on a society. While such control is difficult to achieve organizationally it is almost impossible societally, where subtle forms of control have to be involved in the fabrica- tion of total – not just organizational – identities by the

An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism

That was the byline of an article that appeared in the respected UK newspaper The Independent, by Robert Fisk, on May 7, 2004.34 The reference was to the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib. Apparently, the goal of the US forces in photograph- ing sexual humiliation was to blackmail Iraqi victims into becoming informants against

Twenty techniques of total institutional power

Many of the techniques that were evident in total institutions can be used to make everyday acts of extreme power easier to think and to do. What these extreme cases do is throw everyday power practices into sharp relief. Any one of the techniques in Table 6.1, abstracted from the cases reviewed here, is

The sounds of silence

Sometimes that which is left unsaid is more important than that which is carefully articulated. The silences of power speak from the words they don’t pronounce as much as those they do. Texts speak to us by the words they tell but also by the words they keep quiet. In A theory of literary

Power, conflict and consensus

Conflict theory, the major rival to functionalism, centered on power (Bartos and Wehr 2002), especially as developed by Ralf Dahrendorf (1959). Dahrendorf had incorporated important aspects of Weber’s (1978) work into a basic schema derived from Marx (1976). From Weber, Dahrendorf derived the concept of authority lodged in imperatively coordinated association as the fundament

‘Power to’ conceived as a functionalist relation

1. Power as a circulator y medium Power is similar to money, says Parsons (1964): both are circulatory media. Just as money functions as a generalized mechanism or means for securing satisfaction of desires within the economy – without money you may want things but you cannot buy them because you lack ‘effective demand’

Giddens’ conflict critique of Parsons’ functionalism

Parsons’ theory was sophisticated – but at odds with the experiences of liberal democracies in the 1960s characterized by civil rights demonstrations, race riots, student demonstrations, and the ‘Paris Events of 1968’ which marred General de Gaulle’s last year as president of France. All of these events questioned existing author- ity rather than obeying

Niklas Luhmann’s system building, revising Parsons’ analogies

Giddens was not the only contemporary European theorist to find ideas from Parsons useful; at least two other theorists beat a path to Parsons’ intellectual door. The first of these we shall consider was a German, Niklas Luhmann, another grand theorist with a desire to create a total system of thought. He does so